I had to post this link to this story by E.D Hirsch Jr. in the NY Times Op/Ed section today. As the mother of two children, neither of whom is an outstanding reader, this makes so much sense to me.
My son often has trouble with test questions that require background knowledge outside his curriculum. They distract him by offering irrelevant scenarios and he misses the point of the question entirely. It is grossly unfair to ask questions requiring knowledge of a specific sport, or game, or hiking trail. My suburban/country kids are sometimes confounded by questions involving subway trains and “blocks” walked. In our neck of the woods it’s more likely to be miles than blocks.
We need to test our children on what they’ve been taught in class, in their curriculum. Anything else is grossly unfair.
Is common sense finally going to return to education so that we can quit raising a generation of test takers? I can only hope that it is.
1 response so far ↓
institutrice // April 19, 2009 at 4:01 am
As a teacher in a low SES district, I wholeheartedly agree with what you and Hirsch are saying. We often talk about building kids’ background knowledge, but that can be an overwhelming task. We also talk about teaching kids to analyze questions (QAR Now by Taffy Raphael) and teaching tests as a genre (Test Talk by Glennon Doyle Melton and Amy H. Greene). It’s a game, and we’re here to play.
Of course, the best way to get kids to pass is good, quality instruction. We use QAR and Test Talk to supplement lots and lots of reading. I keep telling my students (and their parents), the only way to get better at reading is to practice, just like a sport or their band instrument. (The problem is they don’t care about reading the way they care about sports or band.
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